


Watch who you bring home

by apricity



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:25:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apricity/pseuds/apricity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Felix and Allison cross paths in the wee hours. Set some time after the season one finale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watch who you bring home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ellabell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellabell/gifts).



Felix comes out of his bedroom with puffy eyes and tousled hair. It isn’t actually a bedroom, just a section of what had been his studio space before the entirety of the not-dead, not-Rachel clone club had moved in. He looked in no better mood than he usually did while reminding people of that tragedy.

 

Alison can’t actually hear what he was saying, but having bunked here for the last week, she can recognize what he is mouthing.

 

“What the ever-loving _fuck_  are you doing?”

 

Alison ignores him and keeps her feet moving in time with the music blaring in her earbuds.

 

_Slide it to the left for two,_

_Clap it high again,_

_Slide it to the right again,_

_And roll down low,_

_And -_

 

This particular Hip Hop Abs workout was just starting to build to its hardest set and even if she has be holed up in clone headquarters with no idea who the real (or realest) enemies were or how to even begin to find that poor little girl or when she will be able to see her own children, she can still get in a work out and cling to that tiniest thread of normalcy for a few minutes each day.

 

So she keeps ignoring Felix until he stands directly in front of her and pulls her ear buds out.

 

“What. The. Tits. Dear?”

 

“Everyone else seems to sleep through it fine,” Allison says, pouting despite her best effort not to.

 

“Yes, but they were asleep when you started thumping around out here,” he pauses and makes a sweeping gesture with his arms, “I’m just settling down to my beauty rest, you see?”

 

He turns on his heel and is nearly out of the room when he spots the enormous Starbuck’s cup. He rounds on her, mouth agape.

 

“You went out? I thought you were supposed to be supposing-to-be with your mum and kids? Right, so we can swap you in for them… or one of them for you?”

 

Felix pauses with a look of consternation.

 

“Fuck. Clone logistics are too much for me to handle this early. I mean, honestly, this is not even an hour that deranged morning-person normals are happy to see. Why are you up? ”

 

“Getting in a work out, clearly,” Alison says, lifting up the shoulders of her pink Lululemon hoodie.

 

Felix’s reaction is torn somewhere between appalled and impressed “What, are you doing that from memory?”

 

Before he can get himself ramped up about the fact that she has memorized multiple work videos, Alison plows on.

 

“Yes, and yes, I went out to get coffee this morning. But I went as Sarah, and-“

 

Felix scoffed, but only a little. He could never avoid having the leather jacket, cap and reverse Pygmalion near-disaster pop into his mind every time a plan came up that involved Allison conning people into believing she was Sarah.

 

“Like I said, I went as Sarah,” Alison continues, entirely unfazed, “And I’m sorry, but all there is to drink in here is liquor.”

 

“And _tea_ ,” he retorts. Then, with a sound of disgust, “Even you posh Americans are completely bestial about tea.”

 

Alison tosses her hands up stiffly, “You know, it’s not like I’m opposed to adding a bit of a kick in the morning, but you don’t have anything to even put it in.”

 

“You’re right,” he says, with an air of resigned suffering, “We have nothing to put it in, so you and I will have to just split some straight up. There’s nothing else for it, really.”

 

Alison’s eye bug slightly, but as she opens her mouth to protest, she’s cut off.

 

“It’ll help me get to sleep and it’ll help you… not finish that workout.” He pauses, grasping, “ Which will also help me get to sleep _and_ it will help the rest sleep until the effects are more or less gone from your system.”

 

Alison looks at him dubiously. She had been awake enough for Hip Hop Abs. She wasn’t sure she was awake enough to follow Felix-logic just yet.

 

As he pours the vodka over ice in two mismatched glasses, he reassures her, “Just don't think about it too hard. I promise it’s brilliant.”

 

Alison had started just to pretend she couldn’t see the glasses she was drinking out of at all, as if they were invisible. It helped. Some.

 

Felix hands her a glass and raises his own for a toast.

 

“To waste not and want not and all that in World War C.” He clinks his glass against her own before she could respond

 

A few silent sips later, she comments, “That isn’t fair. You can’t call it a ‘world war’. At least not what we’ve started with Leekie and Duncan and the Dyad Institute and God knows how many other people.”

 

Felix’s face resumes the look of the most excruciatingly put upon.

 

“I’m only saying that nearly all the Europeans were already dead by the time we got involved.”

 

His expression downgrades to offended.

 

“What about Sarah,” he pauses and looks more offended, “What about _me_?”

 

“Oh, you don’t count, you’re British,” she mutters. 

 

After considering this for a moment, Felix shrugs, nods and takes another swallow.

 

A second gem of Felix-logic as they finish their first glasses leads inevitably to a second round.

 

Equally inevitably, Felix rounds back on how tragic it is for him to have to confine his activities, artistic and otherwise, to such a small corner of his apartment.

 

“But,” he gestures magnanimously around the apartment and wobbles slightly on the edge of the couch, “I have nearly enough space. And you lot aren’t nearly as unpleasant as you could be.”

 

“Maybe we were all genetically engineered so you could tolerate being trapped in an apartment with us.”

 

It comes out far more hollow sounding than Alison had meant it to, and for a moment she freezes.

 

Nothing about the c-word has been easy to work into her life. After the first few weeks of flat out denial she found it creeping into her inner monologue. It became a cog in the mental machinery she used to rationalize her world, a consideration in her analysis of her own behavior. But she was never sure which way the cog turned. Was being a clone a cause? An excuse? Did it dictate more of who she was than the traits she had always associated most strongly with herself? Being constantly around Sarah and Cosima for the last week had been difficult, but she was starting to see herself more clearly in relation to them. She didn't like all of what she saw, but it was still progress.

 

“Or maybe I just tend to like my people snappy, acerbic and prone to occasionally getting completely out-of-their-minds drunk,” he quips as he raises a glass to her.

 

Alison gives a laugh, but an awful whirring, choking noise begins to fill her head. Her first day in Felix’s apartment she had put a fork down the garbage disposal to be sure she wouldn’t have to hear that noise. It still manages to find her though. Now she is the only one hearing it.

 

Tears well up in Alison’s eyes as she says, “I don’t deserve to be liked.”

 

“Oh, well shit,” aghast, Felix watches her slump against the back of the couch, “Maybe the second glass was a poor choice.”

 

He guides her until she’s lying on the couch and crouches beside her.

 

“You shouldn’t like me, Felix,” Alison whispers, sounding horrified. Felix can’t tell whether it’s over what she is saying or that she is saying it that is terrifying her. “I… I’m not a good person.”

 

“Oh, enough with this ‘good’ person crap. I like you. You’re like a bucket of nails to the face sometimes, but you come through for people, you do right by your kids, and you can give an immaculate verbal smackdown. Plus, you appear to have recently decided to take no shit, even when the strategic rules of backstabbing say you should. So, I like you. So tough shit.”

 

He pulls a blanket down to cover Alison, who has managed to stop crying but still looks stricken.

 

“I mean, look at bloody Helena. She got raised by people who broke the entire world into good and bad. She did everything she could to be what they told her was good. And she wound up a total homicidal nutjob. Maybe that’s not what you would have wanted once, but its what you’ve got. And I have to say it isn’t bad.”

 

After Felix leaves, Allison spends the two remaining hours before the rest wake up convincing herself that this would never happen again and that no one would ever find out what had happened at Aynsely’s.

 

When she hears people starting to stir, she gets up and carefully folds the blanket before putting on a kettle for tea. 


End file.
